ditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.

But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and
persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his
sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
that, as Scott had exalted his mediaeval heroes and heroines far above
the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
only supplied a natural demand, may